Western Europe’s last naturally caused famine ended 150 years ago this winter. In a poor and backward part of the Russian empire called Finland, more than a quarter of a million people – nearly 10% of the population – starved to death. Last year, on the centenary of its independence, Finland was ranked, by assorted international indices, the most stable, the safest and the best-governed country in the world. It was also the third wealthiest, the third least corrupt, the second most socially progressive and the third most socially just.

One day last year, a citizen on a prairie path in the Chicago suburb of Elmhurst came upon a teen boy chopping wood. Not a body. Just some already-fallen branches. Nonetheless, the onlooker called the cops. Officers interrogated the boy, who said he was trying to build a fort for himself and his friends. A local news site reports the police then "took the tools for safekeeping to be returned to the boy's parents." Elsewhere in America, preschoolers at the Learning Collaborative in Charlotte, North Carolina, were thrilled to receive a set of gently used playground equipment. But the kids...

BLUEFIELD, W.Va. (AP) - Authorities say a child accidentally locked himself inside a gun safe at a farm supply store in West Virginia. Green Valley Volunteer Fire Department Chief David Thompson told news outlets that the 8-year-old boy locked himself in at the Rural King store inside the Mercer Mall in Bluefield on Saturday afternoon.

White House attorney Ty Cobb was overheard talking about the Russia probe and some of his colleagues at a Washington steakhouse by a New York Times reporter, the publication reported Sunday night. Cobb, who was hired to oversee the White House's legal and media response to the investigation into Russian meddling, was heard talking openly about the Russia investigation with John Dowd, a Washington lawyer with experience in high-profile political cases. "The White House counsel's office is being very conservative with this stuff," Cobb reportedly told Dowd at BLT Steak in Washington last week. "Our view is we're not hiding...

Don Hall was sitting in his living room watching TV with his girlfriend about 9:30 p.m. earlier this year when he was startled by flashing police car lights in his driveway. Hall met the Oneida County sheriff's deputies in the driveway, worried that they were bringing bad news about a family member. Instead, the deputies produced an official document demanding that Hall, a 70-year-old Vietnam veteran who is a retired pipefitter, turn over his guns to them on the spot. On the document Hall said he was described as "mentally defective." When Hall told police he'd never had any mental...

Separate concepts of Russia and the United States on creation of special safety and de-escalation zones in Syria could be compatible, UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura said. “Russia’s idea is in creation of four safety zones in the western part of Syria, the US side thinks about two or three temporary zones of ‘de-escalation’ and ‘stabilization.’ Both the proposals could be compatible in the end,” de Mistura told Il Corriere della Sera newspaper. The diplomat added that the proposed scheme could become effective as the presidents of the Untied States and Russia were engaged in direct talks...

Friday at the White House, during a joint press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, when asked about the 9th Circuit Court ruling upholding the blocking of his executive order banning immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States, President Donald Trump said new steps would be forthcoming next week.

Over at The Tower, San Diego State University student Anthony Berteaux describes the experience of two Jewish undergraduates who attended the University of California's Students of Color Conference—a self-branded "safe space"—only to be met with overpowering anti-Semitism. The conference, Berteaux writes, turned out to be a breeding ground for anti-Israel rhetoric, where progressive activists devoted to fighting discrimination "whitewashed" the history of the Jewish people with "no mention of the Holocaust" and made claims that "the state of Israel pays Jews to move to Israel to join the army and kill Palestinians." "I was made to feel uncomfortable and unwanted...

Late at night this month, the pastor’s phone beeped with a text message from an anguished parishioner. Andre Taylor, the church member’s great-nephew, had been shot and killed. “Dre had just turned 16,” the message on the Rev. Ira Acree’s phone read. “I think that it’s time to call for action and solicit help, have the National Guard to take over and patrol the Chicago streets.” Four days earlier, another text had appeared. A different parishioner’s granddaughter, Daysha Wright, a 21-year-old nursing student, had been shot to death in a car, leaving a 2-year-old son. At his desk at Greater...

Late on Friday there was a surprising announcement by the Federal Aviation Administration according to which night-time flights to and from Los Angeles International (LAX) would avoid flying over the Pacific Ocean to the west of the airport, the second busiest in the US.(snip)...thousands of reports from Los Angeles and San Diego flooded social networks with reports of a mysterious bright light in the sky that sent Californians into panic. The San Diego Union-Tribune said police were inundated with calls "reporting everything from a flare to a comet to a nuclear bomb". The newspaper said the light was seen as...

<p>Europe’s highest court on Tuesday struck down an international agreement that had made it easy for companies to move people’s digital data between the European Union and the United States.</p>
<p>The ruling, by the European Court of Justice, could make it more difficult for global technology giants — including the likes of Amazon and Apple, Google and Facebook — to collect and mine online information from their millions of users in the 28-member European Union.</p>

Attorney General Loretta Lynch believes the United States will be “less safe” if Congress doesn’t reauthorize the Patriot Act. Speaking to “CBS This Morning,” Lynch expressed concerns about not allowing the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of millions of Americans’ phone records. “My biggest fear … is that we will lose important eyes on people who have made it clear … that their mission is to harm American people here and abroad,” Lynch said She continued, “I think that we run the risk … of essentially being less safe. I think that we lose important tools. I think that we...

Cuomo on Sunday defended the parts of the NY Safe Act that remove guns from people deemed mentally unstable, saying the number might be too low. That came after Sunday's New York Times story about the 34,500 people who have been judged too unstable to possess guns since Cuomo signed the gun laws into effect in early 2013.

An upstate New York lawmaker said the loss of manufacturing jobs in the state last month is due to an anti-gun administration that has ignored pleas from local officials to be involved in the negotiating process. “Remington talks have come to a halt,” said Assemblyman Marc W. Butler (R.-Newport), whose district includes the Village of Ilion, where the Remington Outdoor Company has been located for almost 200 years. “We are losing 105 jobs at the Ilion primary plant,” said Butler. In February he predicted long-term consequences of Remington’s decision to expand to Huntsville, Ala., instead of Ilion, N.Y. The small...

A Hamburg resident who was ordered to take down an anti-SAFE Act and anti-Governor Cuomo signs along his fence will be allowed to leave it there for at least the next 30 days after a ruling in State Supreme Court Thursday Scott Zwierucha is accused of a village code violation for the large banner on the fence of his South Park Avenue property. Right now, the sign says "New York is not Safe - Fight Cuomo- preserve your rights.", and he was under a order from the Hamburg town court to remove the signs by tomorrow. New York State Supreme Court Justice...

First speaking to the choir at a roundtable discussion attended by area female political leaders, they then moved over to the party’s campaign headquarters on Fitch Street. Schultz, a congresswoman from Florida, said when she returns home to her district, “no one asks us when are we going to get back to investigating Benghazi; no one asks us when the heck are you finally going to sue Barack Obama; no one says please vote for the 57th time to repeal the Affordable Care Act and take my health care away, yet those are the things that reach the top of...

Safe. Legal. Rare. Three simple words. On their own, powerless. Devoid of any meaning but their individual Merriam-Webster definitions. But string them together and they become something else entirely.â€śSafe, legal and rare.â€ť A phrase that has been used by abortion advocates since the 1990s. A phrase that admits there is something about abortion that demands its rarity. A phrase that, in its beginning, seeks to ominously remind us of the pre-Roe era, a time period during which abortion advocates claimed women died in droves from back-alley abortions. (The truth is much less macabre.)A phrase that todayâ€™s abortion advocates are tired...

The registry process of New York’s SAFE Act allows for warrantless police searches into gun owners’ homes, a violation of the Fourth Amendment, according to plaintiffs of a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court Eastern District.The law firm representing plaintiff Gabriel Razzano argues the registry process is “essentially secret and results in a mandatory, warrantless Penal Law 400 gun removal visit from police.”“The entire purpose of the registry is a sham to permit intrusions into a person’s home on consent without a warrant for a ‘gun removal,’” La Reddola, Lester and Associates said in a release. “The entire registry and...